"Everything here is done by robots. There are different castes of robots. Their functional system is graduated up through ever lessening numbers until it reaches what is only a master switch. One single switch in this World-City, pushed too far--" Draken looked at me suggestively and added hoarsely: "If the master switch was ever pushed too far, this entire civilization, as you call it, would stop functioning with any set mechanical pattern. All the robots and machines and the system they operate would cease activity. There would be your chaos. There would be the needed situation under which the unthinking slaves will have to think for themselves, solve their own problems once again. Or die. I think they will solve them. I have that much faith in them. They always have. So far." It was a statement on Draken's part. But it was really a question. Would I push that master switch--too far? "Why haven't _you_ done this before?" I asked. "Why drag a man from another world, a million years in the past, to do this simple thing?" Draken lowered his head in the first display of real, understandable emotion I had seen in him. Shame. "I can't," he said simply. "I do not have the will, the free will to do it. My intellect tells me it is the correct thing to do. But my psycho-conditioning has created an insurmountable antipathy toward such an act." His dried up monkey-like hands clenched into tiny impotent fists. "Many times I have gone into that room and tried to pull that switch. But each time I have failed. I know now that I shall never be able to. No one in this world could do it until you came. You can. Your age was a dynamic one, of destruction and construction, each inseparable from the other. You could do it, not only with ease, but with the satisfaction of knowing you were taking a necessary step forward in human progress. The question is--will you?" * * * * * A lot of time clambered through my fogged mind then before I formulated a logical sequence of thoughts that led to what seemed to me a logical reply. "I believe I will," I finally answered slowly. "I can't see that there is any other way out." "Execution," a familiarly brittle voice said behind me, and I turned. Draken began whimpering pathetically and cowered back against the colonnade. Jokan stood a few feet from me, wearing a thin, semi-transparent gown that seemed anachronistic and out of place, as though she had gotten the idea for it out of an old history book. Her body was a lithe shadow behind it. But her eyes burned irrascible hatred. "Execution for you, and for Draken; that is a better way."